Radio Clowns - Anthony Cordesman, the conservative but reality-based Iraq analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provides a good thumbnail description of Al Qaeda's war strategy in his most recent report, Iraq's Evolving Insurgency:
The goal of Bin Laden and those like him is not to persuade the US or the West, it is rather to so alienate them from the Islamic and Arab world that the forces of secularism in the region will be sharply undermined, and Western secular influence can be controlled or eliminated. The goal of most Iraqi insurgents is narrower -- drive the US and its allies out of Iraq -- but involves many of the same methods.
As it happens, the paid propagandists of wing nut radio have the same objective -- to promote a clash of civilizations. They do it by playing up every atrocity committed by the insurgents while ignoring every display of massive overkill (like the flattening of Fallujah) committed by the U.S. military, by glorifying torture and degradation (I Heart Gitmo), by demonizing Islam as a "gutter" religion and the Arabs as a subhuman species, and in general by being the loudest, most obnoxious assholes on the face of the earth. Walking billboards for anti-Americanism, in fact.
And they do these things for much the same reason Bin Ladin rants about Zionists and crusaders: because it gets good ratings. Spewing hatred over the airwaves 24/7 keeps the true believers in a permanent froth, drowning out any doubts about the party line and the party elite. This, in turn, makes it easer to paint dissent as treason and criticism of the Cheney administration as support for terrorism. It's all fairly conventional totalitarian stuff -- which is why I tend to think of wing nut radio as the living embodiment of Ingsoc's slogan: Ignorance is Strength.
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